


FLAME

by vanhunks



Series: THE MAN FOR ME - A series for JANEWAY AND PARIS [2]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:54:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6828454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanhunks/pseuds/vanhunks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Tom Paris sits at the con steering Voyager he is accutely aware of a pair of eyes boring into his back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	FLAME

* * *

 

I can clearly remember the day I finally capitulated and admitted to myself that Kathryn Janeway held the key to my heart.

It was the day I kissed B'Elanna for the last time.

I'd held her in my arms and kissed her with so much passion, I thought...  Well, I thought I wanted to be in her arms forever.  Her lips had been soft and pliant. They moved under the insistent pressure of mine. I wanted to eat away at her, taste and nip gently at her lower lip. I'd done it too and let my tongue skim lightly over her teeth. My hands were in her hair and I must have moaned as I twisted the luxuriant strands between my fingers. It felt so good. I remember leaning into her and kissed her eyes, dropped feather-light touches on her cheeks, her hair, her earlobe, back to just lightly brushing her lips again.

She broke off the kiss.

"Tom," she'd said quietly after she smoothed down her hair, "you never kissed me like that before."

"H-how?" I'd managed to stammer.

"As if I were someone else. My body was what you were holding, but, it wasn't me..."

"S-someone else?" I'd stammered again foolishly.

"Yeah. As though I were someone very, very precious - "

"B'Elanna, you are precious to me."

She'd gazed at me with some secret knowledge I'm dead certain women cultivated just to frustrate men.

"I am precious to you, yes. But right now, when you kissed me, it felt different. _I_ felt different."

"B'Elanna, you are imagining it," I'd said in my most wheedling/ placatory tones.

"No, Tom. It was _you_ who imagined _me_ being someone else."

"B'Elanna, I kissed _you_. I love you..."

My hands had found their way to her shoulders and I cursed under my breath when she stiffened at my touch. It was a stance of hers I knew so well - I remove my hands from her, or I kiss the floor.

How could I tell her then that her suspicions were justified? Still, I'd hedged and she persisted. I felt momentarily trapped as she stalked me, her eyes glowing. I should have known she wouldn't back down.

"Oh yes?"

"Oh yes. I love you - "

"Liar," she'd retorted. I'd blanched at the conviction in her voice. I hedged again.

"There's no one, honey. Look, how about you and I - "

"Liar," she'd repeated.

That was when I stopped hedging. My face had felt hot. I hand't needed a mirror to show how I must have blushed. Only then the tension of the last weeks drained from me. I hand't bothered to turn my eyes away from her in the deep mortification I felt in letting her down.  She'd seen it in my eyes, and what she saw...

Her eyes never wavered from mine as she waited for me to speak again. The words, when it came, must have been a complete irony, a complete surrender of my own yearning. To anyone who could have been the proverbial fly on the wall, my words must have seemed a contradiction in terms. They were accompanied by what I knew with certainty, was a moistness in my eyes.

"I need you, B'Elanna," I groaned.

"I know, Tom."

"Then - then you understand?"

"When you kissed me just now, Tom, do you know how I felt?" she'd asked with unaccustomed gentleness.

I sighed. What was I thinking? I might just have lost the best girl I had on Voyager. But B'Elanna touched my cheek, caressed it in that familiar soft fierceness of hers, and said,

"I felt like a queen."

****

 That was the last time I kissed B'Elanna.

It was also the beginning of a never-ending stream of fantasies.

Now, I'm constantly aware of Kathryn Janeway, constantly in a state of nervous energy. I'm sitting at the conn but I don't want to look behind me. I keep my eyes focused on the viewscreen, navigate difficult nebulas and plot courses, enter telemetries and determine when we would arrive at the next M-class planet. I keep busy while I can feel her eyes on me all the time. They burn into me and the heat creeps up from my toes to settle on my back.

What is she thinking? I wonder. Is she aware of me as I am aware of her? I can feel the hair at the back of my neck bristling. I'm thinking, _don't let her get to you_. But she does. I dare not look round, I dare not try to gauge her feelings or her motivations.

I guess she'd probably say, "When I need to know about mating behaviour, I'll know where to go."

Yeah. No points for guessing. It's not as if she didn't have a thing for Chakotay before, but now he's glued to her hip.

I sigh, looking furtively to my left and right, hoping nobody heard me. B'Elanna looks at me from her engineering station and gives me a reassuring nod. I smile and turn my attention to the conn again.

I feel the heat on my back again, my neck hairs dancing to stiffness and the trickle of sweat moving slowly down from behind my ear into the collar of my turtleneck. It is a sensation so ticklish and itchy that I release one hand from the conn and rub my shoulder, at the same time relieving the slight itch the perspiration caused.

I dare not look behind me. I know she's watching me.  Her eyes bore into me and I squirm. That's what she does. She's sitting behind me and she can make me squirm.

Kathryn Janeway.

I call her Queen, I call her Kat, I call her my desideratum, I call her Flame. Those are her names in my fantasies of her, naturally. I could never be so presumptuous to call her anything but Captain Janeway to her face, or when she'll let me, say 'Yes, ma'am'".

I love it when she stands under the illumination panel whether in the boardroom or in the mess hall, and the light catches the burnished tints in her hair. It reminds me of flames, orange-red flames that crackle in the very air she breathes.

What I wouldn't give to run my fingers through that hair! Her flame hair that swishes ever so gently at the slightest turn of her head. I want to feel the softness of it, smell it and just wish she could stay forever in my embrace. I am consumed by those flames then, unable to fight, unable to offer defense. Not that I want to, anyway. I'd go into her lair and willingly get myself entangled in her web. Who wouldn't be drawn to Arachnia? Even Chaotica did, and Proton.  why, Proton was hooked from the start!

I want to feel her body close to mine, feel how she melts against me when I kiss her. I want to press my arousal against her stomach and watch how her eyes grow dark with passion.

I groan again, embarrassed at the way my train of though has caused another little inconvenience. I am sitting here on the bridge, in view of everyone, albeit with my back to them and I have an erection. For a few seconds my fingers splay unsteadily over the conn, and then the unexpected happens. Voyager dips slightly and the new diversion helps somewhat to restore my crazed, out of control libido, but oh, horror!

"Is anything wrong, Mr Paris?"

_Yeah, I only thought of making love to you, and look what you did to me. I'm as stiff as a ramrod._

I look round at last - ah, but she's beautiful! - and I put on my best grin.

"No, ma'am. Everything's under control."

She treats me to one of her special brands of Janeway smirks. "Keep your eye on the road, Mr Paris."

"Aye, ma'am."

I turned towards my precious conn again, feeling the immediate comfort of the panels under my fingers. At least, this little lady dances to my touch. She only talks back when in full compliance.

Strange how I can ponder on the _when_ I thought of my captain as a romantic possibility for me, but I cannot understand the _why_.  I cannot comprehend why I should feel this way about her. It was just there. In the beginning soft teases of thinking of her at the oddest times. Then, gradually, she began to invade my sleep.  Therefore, no long intellectual pondering on why it could happen that while I'm lying in one woman's arms, I should suddenly and inexplicably see a flash of blue eyes and flame hair. No, on that I have stopped to think and just allowed myself the luxury of dreaming.

A luxury.

A luxury to desire Kathryn Janeway with such intense longing that I never know how to act in her company anymore.

I imagine she'd say something like, "Cat got your tongue, Tom?"

Yeah, yeah, _Kat_ got my tongue. She's also got my heart and my mind and soul and every damned thing.

She's not for me.

She's the captain of this ship, married to a man called Duty. She takes her work seriously and has no time for romantic interludes. She is my senior in rank and age, my father's protege, dammit. She kicked my butt a few times on this vessel, busted me, dressed me down, stripped my rank, lost faith in me. Why should she give some Klingon engineer's ex-boyfriend the time of day? Why should she care at all? Why should she look so damnably beautiful and tease me in my dreams?

I would like to walk up to her and say, "I might just be the man for you, Captain."

Talk about being a coward. Yeah, I say all those things, just not to her.

So I huddle with B'Elanna and Harry at our table in the mess hall and I release all my woes on them. At least with them I don't have to pretend.

I know one thing as certain as I'm sitting here - I have reached the point where I'll take anything she offers, even if she kicks me in the rear. Just as long as she touches me, just as long as I can be her sole focus for a few seconds. A few seconds is all I ask.

I should be happy then.

I'll take anything.

Fate plays the most hellish tricks on its victims. I've been dealt a few bad cards myself.

So, I wondered what fate has in store for me as I exit the turbolift on my deck coming off duty.

Was I so preoccupied that I don't notice her? I almost bump into her as she walks down the corridor. There is a purpose in her walk. Doesn't she always walk like that?

I greet her, but my greeting is stilted. I move swiftly away from her, developing a keen interest in the entrance to my quarters. A hand on my arm stills my movement and my entire body seems to go up in flames. I turn to look at her. Under the light the flames dance in her hair.

Flame… I am lost in her beauty.

I'm going to get those few precious seconds.

"Captain?"

"Tom, care to join me for dinner?"

***

 END

 


End file.
